It really comes down to making the unreal real, for both.

(Yes I am a trans woman working on electronic music that has lines about chaos magick in it, I'm continuing a long and proud tradition thank you very much.)

A third friend from that same space who hasn't been around in a while also reached out; matched the three points of the triangle.

There's something to be said for reading about what's worked for other people, but I do think it needs to be taken in critically. Would have definitely saved me a lot of headaches if I had built up my own confidence and discernment before getting into magic.

Unexpectedly heard from two friends who are now reengaging a little bit with a shared space; that was fast, heh.

So, at it's simplest, I think we're looking at the magical version of "do you knoe what you actually want out of life, and what are you actually doing to get it?"

On the flip side, I've met magicians who can get what they want in an immediate sense, but clearly haven't spent a lot of time unpacking those wants, and then wonder why they aren't content and why things always seems to sour over time.

I've seen people present some very impressive and compelling personal gnosis, but when you look at their personal lives they're absolute messes, and their works have mixed results at best. Admittedly, that isn't a true gnosis, but without actually testing it how would they know?

My personal experience has been that they are two components necessary for the whole experience, so to speak. Knowledge without results tends towards escapism at best, cult formation at worst; results without knowledge are just as likely to be blind luck and lack repeatability.

I was lucky to go to a workshop led by an academic who spent the first hours unpacking the the white supremacy history of runes, followed by a review of the actual history along with relevant mythology.

His main points were "do ritual, learn what these mean to you, don't trust authoritarians."

For example; "trick" also means trickster or disruption. Distortion originally came to me as "madness". Sense was "eyes". "Reflection" can also mean "silver" and "moon". Survive roughly corresponds to life forces, literally "pulse".

The various connotations of "shadow" I leave for exercise.

(If you use any Germanic runes in your practice, I highly recommend being wary of the vast majority of resources on them. Highly recommend the use of trance and ritual to uncover what any symbols mean to you - that's how the runes were derived in the first place if you go by the myths, anyways.)

This practice of discovering glyphs lines up with how I was taught runes. While runes do interest me, I do not use them for two reasons:

1) resources on them by and large have been written by Nazis or people citing Nazis.

2) They were developed within a cultural context that no longet exists.

That link is due to a typo; perhaps I should make a proofreader 😅

I don't want to get stuck or attached to a particular paradigm, but it feels worth noting.